The rath on the summit of a knoll near Barnaderg, in County Galway, goes considerably further. Three concentric banks, separated by two intervening fosses, or ditches, encircle a space roughly 43.8 metres across, placing it among the more elaborately defended examples of its type. That degree of effort, in both labour and organisation, suggests this was not an ordinary early medieval farmstead but the seat of someone with the means and the social standing to demand it.

The interior rewards closer attention. Rather than a simple open enclosure, it contains a raised rectangular platform measuring 17 metres north to south and 14 metres across, and set within that platform is an oval hollow, approximately 9 metres long and 5 metres wide, interpreted as the footprint of an associated house. The eastern side of the enclosure retains a causeway entrance about 4 metres wide, the standard arrangement for a rath, where the banks and ditches were simply interrupted to allow access. An older field wall has since cut across the monument at the south-southwest, a reminder that agricultural life has worked around and occasionally through such sites for centuries. The rath sits some 450 metres northwest of Barnaderg Castle, and the proximity of the two sites on the same landscape, separated by perhaps a thousand years of history, is quietly suggestive of the long habit of occupying elevated, defensible ground in this part of north Galway.